April 2, 2012

Australian Tax Office can use FireMonkey to deliver Windows and Mac versions of their e-tax application


Here's a nice example of a Delphi customer having the opportunity to reach more users by creating both Windows and Mac versions of their application with Delphi XE2 and FireMonkey.

ATO considers e-tax for Mac OS X
The ATO's e-tax application currently only supports Microsoft Windows, leaving Linux and OS X users out in the cold. The ATO's official advice has been that it does not support those platforms, even though more users are using e-tax than ever. Those wanting to run the application on their systems could run it using virtualisation or emulation software, with any necessary purchase of software for that purpose being tax deductible.

 However, change was in the wind when a new version of the the Delphi platform, which e-tax is developed on, was released in September last year. This version, Delphi XE2, continues to support the development of applications for Windows, but it also provides support for OS X and iOS.

Read the full article at ZDNet Australia
Learn more about Delphi XE2 and FireMonkey

4 comments:

Jolyon Smith said...

They could, but they most likely won't, once they realise that they have to throw out all their VCL code and redevelop it in FMX and then won't have a true OSX app but an OpenGL game that looks like an OSX app.

And that's assuming that all the other things the app needs to do are even possible in FMX (at leasting Printing is sort of possible now).

The Delphi app was written off on the basis that it would need re-writing to get working on OSX.

That actually still largely remains the case, so after a few $m of tax payers money has found it's way into Cap Gemini's coffers, the end result is likely to be the same: No update to the Delphi app after all.

David said...

Say what you really think Jolyon! ;-)

The article seems a bit optimistic (FireMonkey is vastly superior to VCL? Uhum) but it might just be a year or two ahead of reality. I'm open to the idea that in a few years FireMonkey will be as viable for serious development as VCL is. We will see...

IL said...

Without knowledge what transport (SOAP or REST) and endcryption and/or message signing are involved on the Tax Office side this post looks like marketing letter to me. Yeah, I see it is filed under the case study category, but take the example of Softies. Their case studies are quite thorough with a portion of tech details.

LDS said...

They would still leave out Linux users who may not be a few - forcing them or to buy a Windows license and run it in a VM or buy a whole Mac because you can't legally run MacOSX on non Apple hardware, AFAIK.

Italy developed its tax software in Java. Ugly (often because it looks its developers have very little clue about programming in general...), but at least it runs on most platforms (and with tax data may be important to store them locally until you're ready to send them to the tax offices).